Sublime

‘I’m afraid, Nora’ – he paused for a moment, about the time it takes to lift an axe into the air – ‘I’m going to have to let you go.’

A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.

People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.

Now moons decline and rise, Dead metaphors that looked alive. And you about to die Out past the water-clock of tides Naming and renaming your desires. You rode in wind And scarred the cheek Like the edge of an autumn leaf. I put you in your hollow ship With wine and bread to drift The wine-dark sea. You put me In my hollow ship. A memorized part of

Her father once told her casually that she was built like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.

Sylvie could imagine William walking into the lake, feeling like a tablespoon of water that could no longer stay on a spoon.

silvery as inverted icicles. She has never inhaled such fecund

His eyes, staring up into the abyss, had gone flat like deflated balloons. If a lover’s eyes are a clear mountain lake, Byron’s were a stagnant pond. His mouth twisted open in a silent scream.

No details to catch in the crevices of her mind.